Egyptian Revolution?

The naivete of expectation, well, I've grown accustoned to it. This is what happens when you attain a certain age. This BS in Egypt, all of these gestures to a democratic future...what a joke. This country simply has no history of democracy--the building of the pyramids comes to mind---and never will have. History has certain rules. Egypt will enjoy democracy in the same manner as Russia has done since the heady days of the decline of the USSR. Mubarak has nodded to democracy by transferring authority to, of all institutions, the military. Arab militaries. as everyone knows, represent the long-suppressed voices of the democratic minority in that part of the world. Think Libya.



Democracy?...Democracy? Playoffs?.......Playoffs?

Nina Simone--Princess Noire

Nina Simone was obviously an exceptional talent, and according to Princess Noire, the recent biography by Nadine Cohondas, almost impossible to live with or be around. Trained in classical piano as a young girl in Tryon, North Carolina, Nina Simone (the Eunice Waymon) studied for a while at The Juilliard School, but was afterward rejected for admission by the Curtis Institute, which Simone interpreted as a racial snub. She maintained the dream of becoming a performer of classical music, but eventually backed into playing blues and jazz as a young woman in New York City. All of this, as well as Simone's early career, Cohondas treats with substantial detail. I found the account of Simone's transformation into a protest musician during the Civil Rights period fascinating, and I found myself listening to "Mississippi Goddam" and "Backlash Blues" as I read.

Nina Simone's behavior soon grew erratic, and she would berate audiences or storm off the stage. Beginning in the late 1960s, it appears, one in possession of a ticket to a Nina Simone performance stood only an even chance of watching her perform. Indeed, Cohondas focuses on the tragic trajectory of Simone's life in the book's second half, and the story assumes the form of a series of tales of crude behavior, missing opportunities, and crumbling fortunes. Certainly there was more to Simone than that.

Still, Princess Noire contains vivid descriptions of Simone's music, and that alone makes the book worthwhile.

Seeing or hearing?

Gérôme was perfect, but few care to view his work these days. Once, at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, a would-be artist was aping Gérôme’s The Carpet Merchant, and the young imitator somehow upset his easel, which toppled onto Gérôme ’s painting, tearing its canvas. I worked at the museum then, and I remember that Gérôme’s original was quickly whisked off to the catacombs below for restoration. A momentary whirr of excitement about the mishap carried throughout the administrative offices and spilled into the galleries for a spell before it all settled down. I worked there for two years after that episode, and I cannot remember when the restored painting returned to the gallery. All I can recall is that one day, as I was walking the gallery beat, I noticed The Carpet Merchant hanging in its old space on the wall. And I remember wondering about how the return of the painting to its place had escaped my attention, especially as I was rather familiar with the stretch of galleries in the modern Western European wing of it all.
Why had such a furor over the damage to The Carpet Merchant risen and died as quickly as it had? I suspect that the museum staff simply ran a tight ship, and such an affront to any work of art would have been greeted with like thoroughness. I suppose that The Carpet Merchant hadn’t been considered much of a painting after all; it was in its near-exactitude of depiction a virtual photograph. And that’s part of the problem. When painters achieved a skill of depiction nearing verisimilitude, there was nowhere for painters to go, so they veered off into odd directions. And this is exactly what you saw.
What about music, which also began to see odd variations in form at about the same time? One can’t judge Schoenberg and Beethoven with the same ruler, after all. When perfection in music was achieved, what did it resemble? Gérôme painted a photograph, and so painters had to move sideways and yield to the photographers (at least for a time, as photography resembles verisimilitude less and less). Who is the Gérôme of music? Which musician achieved the precise depiction reality? Bach? Mozart? Anyone?
There was no objective reality there. It was impossible to attain because the possibilities of music were infinite. The visual arts regress or move sideways.
It seems to me that I would prefer to retain my hearing to my eyesight if presented with a choice between the two. Hearing simply offers a greater possibility of feeling, sensation, and profundity than sight, for all its obvious practical applications, can ever hope to supply.

Prostitute is an underused term, for it suggests a proffering of something innate and dear to oneself for the prospect of flimsy gain. In its purest sense, the term prostitute defines not a single person, but every single one of them, man and woman alike; it's a common thread, like mammality is. Prostitute is often considered a pejorative term, but I can imagine it settling comfortably upon our shoulders--those angel wing harnesses were troublesome, anyway. I propose that we everywhere replace person with prostitute until further notice. We needn't seek a replacement for prostitute because our nature has reduced the original thrust of the term to a condition of terminal vacuity.

How fascinating it is to speak a living language!

My Little Kindergarten

The plumbing failed, and so we took to crapping into paper bags, which we hurled in the hammer-throw manner from the roof as soon as completed. This sort of behavior, drastic as it was, warded off even the most predatory of gangsters, for an unanticipated “flying latrine” to side of the head in the middle of a drug deal or a car-jacking proved sufficient to relieve even the most hardened gangster of a street cred years in its making. So it came about that our little hellhole turned into the epicenter of a drug-free zone whose radius extended stiffly outward for several blocks. My cousin raised his kids there.

Slavery by Another Name by Douglas A. Blackmon

This is a terrifying book, for it lays bare the effective re-enslavement of African Americans after the Emancipation Proclamation ostensibly set them free. Blackmon throws light on the way that unscrupulous lawmen and businessmen in Alabama, Georgia, and Tennessee seized black men and women---mostly men, incarcerated them on trumpted-up charges---typically, vagrancy--- and sold them as convict laborers to southern industrial concerns. Once purchased, these African-American men endured horrific conditions in the mines of the south; they were beaten, starved, and worked to death.



All the while, the occasional crusaders for justice--Wareen S. Reese, for one----saw their efforts at redress met by a stone wall of southern injustice. Vested southern interests had little practical reason to extend the hand of equity toward helpless southern blacks. It was only in the mid-twentieth century, when improved technology rendered labor-intensive methods of production of coal and steel obsolete and the federal government feared exposure as hypocrites by the Nazi enemy, that the U.S. government enacted and enforced laws against enslavement.

Anyone who thinks that the Jim Crow period--Blackmon prefers the term Neoslavery---was a period of harsh treatment of essentially free people will find themselves summarily disabused of that notion up reading this book. The chapter "Anatomy of a Slave Mine"--whose title is a euphemism--speaks volumes.

German companies have compensated the victims of Nazi atrocities. Should U.S. Steel do the same?

Read
Slavery by Another Name and wince. And learn.

An Enjoyable Bromide

This book is a necessary book, not because the reader should agree with all of Howard Zinn's ideas--he occasionally drifts off into ranting, especially in his chapter on the Clinton presidency---but because Zinn poses explanations for events in US history that are plausible. The idea that the top one percent of US society has since the inception of this country held its position by maintaining divisions among those below it makes sense given the current distribution of wealth in this country.

What strikes me as unconvincing is his claim that the slightly privileged (mostly middle-class whites) have been used as a buffer against potential concerted action by society's losers. He provides evidence that suggests that this might be the case (uncited eveidence, as this is a history written for a wide audience), but I didn't see conclusive proof of the grand conspiracy against the downtrodden. In many cases, Zinn quotes three of four people whose cases might mean they were victims of calculated exploitation.

The value of this book, in my eyes, is as a corrective of the great men, great country interpretation of US history that I was fed in middle school and high school. Every society, after all, is made up of a small minority of winners and a mass of losers. What Zinn does is that, by strongly suggesting that the US is no different than elsewhere, he deflates the notion that this is a special land.

The culture that might be considered an anomoly to what he sees in the US was the pre-Columbus Native American culture, which held most everything in common and was ignorant of monetary culture. So in a sense, Zinn weeps for a lost, ireetrievable past.

This a book that every educated person should know about and enjoy reading--for Zinn is a fine writer. It needs to be part of the discussion of US history.